Sensacell makes walking fun with interactive LED floor

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Floors aren’t the most interesting surfaces in the world. We cover them in wood, carpet, tiles or any number of different materials, but we tend to just walk over them never looking back.{ad}

Sensacell aim to change that though, with a floor you’ll want to stop and look at, walk over again and again and generally play with. As you can see in the video above they’ve added an element of interactivity to a surface that reacts as you walk across it.

The interactive floor works by combining an array of 49 LEDs with a single capacitive sensor into a module much like a tile. These are then laid out on a surface and getting close to them activates the lights. Each interactive tile can sense up to 6-inches allowing for touch-free interaction while weighing just 167 grams each.

The tiles seen in the video above use a super bright white LED, but Sensacell also do a monochrome version and an RGB version that is more sensitive and can display images and video too.

Matthew’s Opinion
So would anyone consider having these in the home? They’d certainly win you favor with your children, but then expect every friend they have to visit regularly and run around on them for hours.

There is certainly a lot of potential for interactive games using these tiles if they can be programmed to light up in sequence. Games like remembering the path and re-lighting it by walking the same pattern, or timed games where you have to reach a lit spot before it dims. You could even make a fairly competent dancing game without the need for a separate screen telling you where to step.

The Sensacell website seems fairly new with some sections still marked “coming soon”. I couldn’t find any details of pricing and that will surely be one of the major limiting factors as to who buys them if they are expensive. Hopefully it’s a cheap system, but looks to require a PC to make it work from what I can gather from the PDFs they have on their site.